


i'd rather pretend i'll still be there at the end

by yuusaku



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Zexal
Genre: Identity Issues, One-Sided Attraction, Parent/Child Incest, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-12 14:53:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10493307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuusaku/pseuds/yuusaku
Summary: When Thomas is eleven and three quarters he sprains his ankle. It's a summer day and his foot catches on an uneven patch of ground and he's down, sprawled in the grass and howling when Chris tries to help him up. There's no chance of getting him back home like this, not when they can't get him on his feet and his ankle is getting more swollen by the moment, so in the end Michael is sent running back to the house for help while Chris sits, skin pale and face pinched, and watches Thomas.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I realized partway through writing this that Byron never actually got de-Tron'd in canon but oh well, ignore that.

When Thomas is eleven and three quarters he sprains his ankle. It's a summer day and his foot catches on an uneven patch of ground and he's down, sprawled in the grass and howling when Chris tries to help him up. There's no chance of getting him back home like this, not when they can't get him on his feet and his ankle is getting more swollen by the moment, so in the end Michael is sent running back to the house for help while Chris sits, skin pale and face pinched, and watches Thomas.

Byron comes soon enough, Michael apparently having been left behind at home for now. He and Chris try to hold Thomas up between them, but Byron is too much taller than Chris and Thomas is too much smaller than the both of them and so in the end Byron just sweeps Thomas up into his arms. The sudden change makes Thomas gasp, head rushing at being lifted so suddenly, but Byron holds him secure and as he's carried back to the house he can hear Byron's heartbeat against his ear, slow and steady.

When they're home, it's mostly just a question of icing the sprain and taking painkillers. It's simple; the kind of thing Chris has learned to handle by now and that Thomas probably could too if he could put any weight on his left foot. So he expects it to be Chris who _does_ handle it, because Byron is always so busy that Thomas doesn't remember the last time he got to spend a long time with him, and certainly not without at least Michael there too.

But Byron stays this time, doesn't disappear into his office the moment Thomas is settled. He even lets Thomas pick out a movie and then stays sat beside him, large and warm against his side with an arm curled around his shoulders. It makes an odd feeling twist in his gut, pleasure and confusion and guilt because he shouldn't be _glad_ about being injured but without it he wouldn't have gotten this time with Byron and so he _is_ glad, despite himself.

It lasts a couple days, until Thomas can move around without too much pain, and then Byron starts to drift away again. Disappears into his office more often and for longer periods until Thomas is barely seeing him again, and Chris has taken over any last bits of help Thomas needs like he'd expected in the first place.

* * *

When Thomas is twelve, Byron disappears more permanently. Him and Chris had been on some expedition, something that Thomas can't remember the details of except that it had taken _both_ of them away, and when Chris comes back he has some official-looking stranger beside him who explains that there's been an accident, that Byron is gone. Chris sits between Thomas and Michael and tries to hold onto them with shaking arms, and Thomas can't tell if Chris is more stricken by Michael's inconsolable sobs when he understands or the way that Thomas shrugs off his arm and shuffles away from him to sit alone instead.

For all that he seems stricken by being pushed away then, though, he apparently has no qualms with throwing _them_ away later. He tells them he'll visit and if it weren't for Michael then Thomas would tell him not to bother, not to worry himself with pretending to care about them which he's throwing them away. For Michael's sake he holds his tongue, though, bites it until it bleeds and doesn't say a word.

It doesn't matter in the end, it turns out - Chris never visits anyway.

* * *

When Thomas is fifteen, Chris finally comes for them. His hair is longer and he looks drawn and pale and exhausted and Thomas hates him. Hates him even more when Michael runs to him like he was never gone, throws his arms around him like he never _abandoned_ them. Thomas hangs back, glaring venom, but Michael is joyful and laughing and telling Chris all the things he's missed as though he was gone a day, not _three fucking years_.

When Chris beckons him forward too he almost refuses, but Michael is looking at him pleadingly and so he gives in, steps foward to glare at a closer range.

"We can go home now," Chris tells them, and if there's something tight and guilty and almost fearful in his voice then Thomas doesn't _care_ , he doesn't _care_ how Chris feels when Chris so clearly didn't care how they felt for _three years_.

Only Michael's still-pleading eyes keep him from spitting the bile he wants to, so in the end he just snorts and mutters, "Yeah, great. Fine."

For all that he said home, though, it's a hotel that he takes them to once they're passed over into his care. He takes them to a room in a dingy-looking place on the outskirts of the city, and there they meet Tron.

Tron, who is smaller than Michael and utterly mad and nothing like Byron no matter what he or Chris might claim. Tron, who looks at Thomas in a way that makes him feel sick to his stomach.

Tron, who takes away their names as though they haven't lost enough already.

Tron, who orders him to duel that girl and gives him a card that isn't _right_ and then, he realizes when he fails, expects him to leave her to die. Who marks his face with blood and burning, leaves him a brand to remind him that he failed every time he looks in the mirror and no other scars beside that even though there should have been more, there should have. Who lets him be reminded of his failure, but never of the fact that he saved his girl except inasmuch as saving her was his failure.

Tron, who orders him to get the girl's brother disqualified from a tournament as if they haven't done enough to those kids already.

Tron, who carves off pieces of his heart and only cares whether he's a good enough tool.

He misses his father.

* * *

When IV is seventeen, he's set to hunting numbers, and to getting the heart pieces that all four of them will need to progress in the World Duel Carnival. The rest of them stay home and leave it all to him and take what he gets for them without a word of praise.

But it makes sense, he supposes. You wouldn't praise a knife for cutting, and he's just as much a tool and a weapon as any knife.

So he does as he's told, collects numbers and heart pieces and hurts the ones he takes them from and hates them for being so weak as to fall so easily when he walks through hell every day and comes out of it victorious time and time again. Collects four heart pieces for each of them to fill up all four frames and laughs at the irony of it, all the fours of the filled hearts and him collecting them when his own heart has been carved out of him.

When it comes to the duel coaster, when he faces off against Shark again, he's so _tired_. He's tired but he's desperate and angry and, _god_ , it's not like he hadn't already known what Tron thinks of him but it still cuts at pieces of him he thought were long gone to hear it, still leaves him desperate to prove him _wrong_ , to prove he's worth something, to prove he's _better_ than what Tron has tried to make of him.

It's not a surprise, really, when he loses. He'd wanted to win but more than that he'd wanted it to _stop_ , and if anything he welcomes the blackness that comes after.

And then when he's awake again, when they're picking themselves back up and trying to build something out of the ashes, Tron tries to give them back their names as though it's nothing, as if he wasn't the one that took their names and twisted the things under them into things that didn't fit the names anyway. Or maybe that was only him - V and III seem happy enough to be Chris and Michael again, at least.

It feels like almost no time at all after that before they have to face up against the Barians. He duels with Shark and thinks maybe he might remember a little of what it feels like to have a heart. Thinks he might remember a little of what it feels like to be a person instead of a weapon.

And then Shark is one of them, he's a Barian and he's the enemy _again_ and IV wishes he'd never let himself feel anything.

(he welcomes the blackness this time, too)

* * *

Three days before IV's eighteenth birthday, the universe is rewritten. He's alive again and so are all the others, but more than that— more than that, Tron is Byron again.

He slots back into things awkwardly, for all that Tron had gotten closer to him after the WDC. Michael reacts, as always, as if things have never been anything but normal, but Chris is stiffer with him than he'd been as a teenager and IV…

IV doesn't know how to be Thomas again. He tries and tries to pick up the pieces, to remember what Thomas had been like before he'd been burnt out and turned into a weapon, but it's like trying to hold water in outstretched hands and he just _isn't him_ , not anymore.

All that time spent wishing for his father back and hating the thing in his skin that wasn't him, only to become the thing wearing Thomas' skin that isn't Thomas.

Well, he thinks to himself at his bitterest moments, at least now Byron will know how it feels.

* * *

When IV is eighteen, he sprains his ankle again. It's the same as all those years ago in so many ways, except that this time he goes down alone on dead leaves and sits there shivering after he's called Michael and told him where he is.

It's Byron that turns up alone again, though, just like the last time. Byron who could probably help him to his feet this time but sweeps him up again instead, and IV doesn't know if it's because of last time that Byron does it but he knows it's because of last time that it makes his heart ache because he's not the _same_ as back then, he's not Thomas and he doesn't think he ever _will_ be but god does he want to be. He wants to be Thomas because he wants to _fit_ again, wants to have a place again, wants—

He doesn't think before he's leaning up in Byron's arms in a rush and kissing him, all tongue and teeth so that Byron reels back and nearly falls or drops him or he doesn't _know_ , just knows that the arms holding him jerk and that his head is reeling and then Byron is pushing him back as best he can without dropping him, eyes wide as he shakes his head sharply. And he's saying _Thomas, no_ , and IV is grinning before he knows it, a sharp white knife-slash of a thing that leaves all the things he wants to say trapped behind his teeth and howling against the inside of his heart so that at least _those_ will stay a secret.

(they don't speak on the way home, and when they get there Byron just takes IV to his room and leaves him there with ice and painkillers, leaves him to curl up on his bed and laugh until it turns into jagged, broken sobs)


End file.
